Hookers vs translators: Who is winning?

According to popular belief, a sex worker (formerly “prostitute”) and a localizer (formerly “translator”) are the world’s oldest professions. There’s a lot of similarities between these occupations. First of all, it’s fun - when on the job, you meet all kind of folks, including celebrities and high-ranking statesmen, jerks and perverts, doctors and patients. They are clever and dumb, polite and rude, handsome and ugly but mostly nice and interesting people. During the intercourse, they enrich you. Sometimes, literally.

Before doing their job, both whores and translators have to figure out what the client wants. It’s impossible to translate someone, whose speech is meaningless. Most people, alas, talk like that, but translators somehow manage to figure out what they say and translate their message. The result is often shorter, better and meaningful. Or total shit because the original message was bad ‘beyond repair’ and impossible to decipher. But in the worst case scenario, we can always pretend that we understand them and say something. Anything. We have to, otherwise we don’t get paid. Pretending, or plain bullshitting is our second nature.

One way or another, for thousands of years translators and hookers earned enough to feed themselves, bring bread and butter to their families, in the meantime having fun and enjoying comfortable life. For the most part.  At least one sex worker felt so good about what she was doing she even wrote a book - The Happy Hooker. I am sure there must be a blog or two of happy translators out there as well.

Aggressive competitors and/or amateurs, carpal tunnel syndrome, clap and other industrial diseases, pimps, translation agencies, and in case of Washington State DSHS/Medicare jobs - brokers, took some happiness away but we maintained positive attitude, and lived on. Some of us did well, especially those who started non-profits and professional associations based on the old principle of ‘mining the miners’. Since mining the miners is about business skills, not linguistic artistry, it deserves a separate (not be confused with “seperate”) topic in my blog. I’ll discuss it in another post.

With the advent of personal computers, PDAs, digital photo and video cameras, broadband telecom, and specifically - upon arrival of Almighty Internet, life as we know it changed. Millions of people around the world faced unemployment. To stay competitive, you urgently needed to learn new skills and master newest technologies. In just a few years thousands of crafts, jobs and even professions have become all but extinct! But it didn’t seem to have any adverse effect on the two oldest occupations. At least that’s what I thought about my job of a professional translator.

As a translator, I wholeheartedly welcomed personal computers. Compared to typewriters, working on a PC was soooo easy: cutting and pasting whole chunks of text, recycling previously translated sentences, correcting typos, etc. Then Internet crawled into my office via the legendary US Robotics Courier V.Everything. “Everything” indeed: I flashed it through 14.4/28.8/33.3/56 speeds and used it for nearly ten years. At the time, the modem cost me more than today’s 17” widescreen laptop, but I feel it was my best IT investment! Suddenly, finding the right word or an obscure term became as simple as finding a local gas station with the cheapest gasoline (“petrol” in UK) on an iPhone today.

The new tools, software and various technical gadgets increased translator’s productivity and made the whole process very enjoyable. I felt like the sky was the limit. Silly me, I forgot about thousands of others who saw the immense potential new technologies provided to anyone with a computer connected to the outside world. Especially, new communication channels, like email and instant messaging. It wasn’t long before smart project managers in western countries saw opportunities for huge savings by sending translation jobs to ‘native speakers’ who were residing in the target locales. Unlike Walmart outsourcing, translation ‘outsourcing’ was a good thing, at least theoretically.

Good for an American translation company’s balance sheet, but not so good for ‘native speakers’ based in the US. Within a couple of years, I lost more than half of my clients among translation agencies. Most of those agencies didn’t survive unless they readjusted themselves to the new environment, like my Rusloc did. Another problem of the translation profession in the USA is the attitude of business community to it.

Many people still think that if you know two languages you can translate between them. It’s hard to believe but most American CEOs ask their bilingual office assistants to translate important business correspondence into Spanish. I guess that is why 90% of all translation agency websites’ content is devoted to “client education”. Telling potential clients obvious things like “In our company, only native speakers of the target language will be translating your materials” is just plain pathetic! Have you ever seen a hospital website telling you that only qualified doctors will perform heart surgery? Wow! Not Jane or Joe, an avid reader of magazines like Prevention or Health, but a real doctor will cut you up!

In the meantime, globalization settled in, and the translation industry started changing really fast. Freelancers’ easy access to clients resulted in fierce competition and soon the rates went down. Way down. Translators were gradually replaced by localizers. Based on my observations, which are mostly based on the analysis of the Russian localization market, the latter is a much younger version of the former. Russian localizer is a male and in most cases his command of English is poor. With few exemptions, he learned English playing computer games and watching American movies and television serials. Most of Russian localizers lack the command of their native Russian language as well, and have very little translation experience if any.

I don’t blame those kids because there are many objective reasons for their success and popularity despite lack of qualifications. Experienced translators with classic foreign language education in college and dozens of years of practical work under their belt didn’t catch the localization train because they were intimidated by computers. In the last 20 years translation in Russia have become a joke and in my opinion was one of the reasons for the deterioration of the quality of the modern Russian language. Which is not uniquely a Russian problem. Many other cultures are affected by the Internet-based onslaught of mediocrity.

Who is responsible for the deterioration of Russian language (I call it ‘lingvonecrosis’)? Even though I live outside of Russia, I am not disconnected from life there. I watch Russian TV, listen to their radio stations, download their latest movies, books, read online versions of their newspapers and magazines. And I can attest: All the above are responsible. Cinema: Horrible “translation” of American B-movies; Literature: horrible (cheap) translations of foreign books, horrendous domestic best-sellers, mostly crime, melodrama, detective stories and politics.

The saddest picture is today's Russian radio and TV. Instead of USSR's few radio stations and 3 television channels broadcasting linguistically polished Soviet propaganda, today it's a mayhem of low quality, amateur-like productions, which popularize anything and anybody but characters who speak decent Russian language. Mostly they glamorize the opposite: criminals, crooks, and police detectives who speak like thieves themselves, celebrities who speak like third graders. Even their president, prime minister, soon to be president again speaks like he served time in gulag.

You may wonder, how come? Russian schools were among the best and the Soviet people was among the best educated in the world, what happened? Simple. First, it was a lie - Russian schools were not the best, and second, today university diplomas (and all other official educational certificates ) are for sale. The walls in the metro trains and buses are covered with ads. There are hundreds of websites openly offering to sell you ANY diploma, including those from the most prestigious schools.

Another reason is what I call “Smartphone Generation”. You cannot understand your kid’s SMS? A Moscow parent has the same problem, only it's worse - they don’t even use Russian words anymore. It’s called es-em-es-ka. But let’s go back to our… job security comparison.

Unlike the sex worker services, demand for translations is steadily declining

Why are translators loosing in this “competition”? Their main job was (and still is) translating texts for people to read. Educated, or at least literate people. Folks who are interested in reading high-quality materials in their native language. But this market is declining, and below are some reasons for that decline:

• reading habits change: digest versions, abridged texts, book on tapes, or in mp3 players like iPods;
• corresponding with friends and family: no more letters written by hand, and delivered by ‘snail’ mail. Even my 83 year old neighbor prefers ‘shooting’ an email over to her many friends and relatives. As for Airborne Express, DHL, FeDex, UPS, they are busy delivering online purchases not documents; and the USPS is busy moving around millions of tons of crap, sorry junk. Junk mail that is;
• machine translation is getting better and better, especially in some language pairs, and in certain applications. Many people take advantage of it to gain speed, sacrificing quality;
• we are more affected by the fast-pace world of today, where the English language is dominant and in some countries, like Sweden, is actually substituting the native language;
• declining numbers of people who actually read and enjoy the process, savoring the beauty of languages.

The profession of a translator was always in demand but not always appreciated. Moral satisfaction of doing something good for the mankind did not pay the bills. “I must be crazy to do this”, is the general mood of many literary translators who introduced Russian population to foreign classics. Most of them worked during the Soviet time, because in the pre-revolution Russia most educated people didn’t need translations. They traveled and studied abroad and knew several foreign languages.

In 1990s there was a brief period when translation suddenly became a very lucrative occupation. All of a sudden, everyone needed to have his/ her business card translated in a dozen languages, together with a home page on the Web and a company brochure.

A good translator could easily make $100K or more. But with a small “IF” - if he/she was a savvy (advanced) computer user and could quickly learn the intricacies of Internet, WinFax and other technologies that enabled his instant linking with an eager client. There were very few such translators among Russians. I am speaking about ‘old school’ folks. Dozens of my school mates and army buddies, all of whom are TOP-NOTCH linguists, didn’t learn computers beyond an occasional game of Tetris, and emailing a short message (if their children or grandchildren showed them where to click). Sadly, it’s not a joke.

I don’t have data for other languages, and my impressions are mostly based on what I saw in the USA, but Internet-based Russian freelance translation market was quickly flooded with two types: (1) Russian brides, who invaded America at about the same time as Internet became popular and accessible. Their American husbands quickly saw an opportunity to provide them with a home-based job, so hundreds of ‘Russian translation services’ invaded the web overnight; and (2) graduates of Soviet/Russian foreign language institutes, who had access to Internet. 90% of them residing in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, the remaining 10% - all across the world.

It was a “gold rush” time. Uneducated clients, totally without a clue how much they should pay for the translation, where to find a translator… They didn’t know a good translator from a bad one. In fact, Americans didn’t realize translation was a profession. You know that anecdote about persons who speak two, three languages (bilingual, trilingual)?.. Translation was not even listed among the US Department of Labor officially recognized professions till mid 90s. It dismays me but it’s true. Three years ago a national publication listed it as the ‘hottest job’, not requiring a college degree! No kidding we were put between Sales reps and Insurance adjusters, and the Headline of that article was “The Hottest Jobs (No College Degree Required)”.

Not being an expert on the other oldest profession, I don’t know if they are still ‘happy’, but it’s obvious that translator is a dying trade. Want another proof? Here it is, and it’s sexy. Recently, I came across an ‘official’ localization of a string in a Microsoft software. “Employee emergency contacts” was localized as “Экстренные связи с сотрудником” , which could be back-translated as “urgent sex with employee”. 

Indeed, that’s what we are going to end up with, both hookers and translators – a quickie!

Today is September 30, so Happy International Translators Day!